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Featured in Development

Understandability is the concept that a system should be presented so that an engineer can easily comprehend it. The more understandable a system is, the easier it will be for engineers to change it in a predictable and safe manner. A system is understandable if it meets the following criteria: complete, concise, clear, and organized.

Featured in Architecture & Design

Sonali Sharma and Shriya Arora describe how Netflix solved a complex join of two high-volume event streams using Flink. They also talk about managing out of order events and processing late arriving data, exploring keyed state for maintaining large state, fault tolerance of a stateful application, strategies for failure recovery, data validation batch vs streaming, and more.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Tim Cochran presents research gathered from ThoughtWorks' varied clients and projects, and shows some of the metrics their teams have identified as guides to creating the platform and the culture for high performing teams.

Interview: Tim Bray on the Future of the Web

In this interview made during QCon SF 2008, Tim Bray talks about why he is not convinced with the buzz surrounding Rich Internet Applications and shares his ideas on Cloud Computing. He also expresses his opinion regarding the debate REST vs. WS-* and the future directions web technologies will be taking.

Re: great interview

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I love the irony of this interview. Tim Bray is talking about web usability and the interview is posted to one of the most unusable, poorly designed websites I have ever seen in my life. Do you guys have any idea what you are doing?

Take this quote from the interview: "Oh it was so great when the vendors all brought in the web interfaces because it forced them to get rid of all these weird cascading menus and options that nobody ever used, [...] I think a dollar with that kind of richness is worth a thousand dollars of things that wiggle when you put the mouse over them."

And how is the interview presented in this javascript-abusing, godawful website? I have to read through a key hole and click on worthless little widgets. This is extremely counter-productive and annoying.

You guys need to take a lesson from Tim and lay out your website in some reasonable way.

Re: great interview

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... the interview is posted to one of the most unusable, poorly designed websites I have ever seen in my life. Do you guys have any idea what you are doing?

...

And how is the interview presented in this javascript-abusing, godawful website? I have to read through a key hole and click on worthless little widgets. This is extremely counter-productive and annoying.

You guys need to take a lesson from Tim and lay out your website in some reasonable way.

I cannot disagree more, Jeff. Oh, and by the way, the Tim's interview was fantastic.

I've been using InfoQ for several years and love the cleanliness and usability of the site. In fact, I'd venture to say that it's a model for information-rich, mixed media presentation and interaction. Their combination of video and textual presentation of interviews is fantastic. Click on text you want to hear again and the video resets to that point.

Jeff, I challenge you to post a single link to a website you had any part in developing that rivals InfoQ.

Re: great interview

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... the interview is posted to one of the most unusable, poorly designed websites I have ever seen in my life. Do you guys have any idea what you are doing?

...

And how is the interview presented in this javascript-abusing, godawful website? I have to read through a key hole and click on worthless little widgets. This is extremely counter-productive and annoying.

You guys need to take a lesson from Tim and lay out your website in some reasonable way.

I cannot disagree more, Jeff. Oh, and by the way, the Tim's interview was fantastic.

I've been using InfoQ for several years and love the cleanliness and usability of the site. In fact, I'd venture to say that it's a model for information-rich, mixed media presentation and interaction. Their combination of video and textual presentation of interviews is fantastic. Click on text you want to hear again and the video resets to that point.

Jeff, I challenge you to post a single link to a website you had any part in developing that rivals InfoQ.

And this is the problem with "Enterprise" developers

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People who live completely in the "Enterprise" world seem to forget what usability means, and care only that you have as much info crammed into one space as possible. Whether we are talking about some horribly over engineered software bus(ESB) or a web page that has a dozen boxes of content strewn about the screen resulting in a cluttered mess (As is the case here).

And don't give me the "Show me your great website then" crap. Look at many other professional sites (Google search, Cisco's page, Lockheed, or about 90% of other big businesses), you'll notice they are clean and simple with actual room for whitespace, and clearly defined navigation areas, with most of the area devoted to content. There are obvious offenders though like Yahoo, and to a lesser extent Amazon.

Also anyone who thinks it's a great idea to put the actual content users are trying to read in little 2 inch boxes is deluding themselves. Although I doubt sane comments will be worthwhile to anyone defending the usability of this site, since they all seem to have classical confirmation bias working against reality.

What's your problem?

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Gee, I don't get what your problem is with InfoQ. If you have orientation problems with this simple and clean layout, you are in real trouble. Don't participate in traffic with any vehicle, that's all I can say!

Apparently, you actually seem to enjoy posting. How on earth did you figure this one out... :-D

Re: The counter arguement...

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I couldn't agree more with Yakov, people that negate the advances of RIA are simply looking in their rear view mirror. Note that most of the REST community is actually on board with that as no one talks about using HATEOAS, which according to Roy is the core of REST, and everyone promoting the use HTTP in an RPC mode (a.k.a lo-REST).